No awards for MPs' websites this year

bcsawardBad news for anyone who’s just put a massive amount of work into an innovative, cutting-edge website for an MP. (Ahem.) I’ve received confirmation from the British Computer Society – oops, sorry, ‘BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT’ – that their annual awards recognising the best websites by Members of Parliament aren’t quite as ‘annual’ as the label might suggest.
I noticed that the new BCS website seemed to be downplaying the info on their MP Website Awards – and emailed to ask if it was still happening this year. The response – quite telling in its own way – came back:

The decision was taken earlier this year not to hold the competition this year. We decided that would give MPs time to have another look at their websites as, while some had really made efforts to improve their sites as a result of our first year competition, a significant proportion had not. BCS is still very much interested in the competition and we hope we can take it forward in the future.

A pity. But then again, I suppose those websites will be facing the ultimate test of their effectiveness – with their constituents in a general election – next spring.

FCO seeks new head of digital

Another senior digital job pops up: this time, it’s the Foreign Office looking for a Head of Digital Engagement. It’s a Senior Civil Service band 1 position, a 2-year fixed-term contract with a salary up to £90k (plus London weighting, plus 6 weeks holiday!), managing the 30-strong team based in London, Washington, New Delhi and Singapore.
But it’s not Stephen Hale‘s position – or is it? Announcing the vacancy on his FCO-hosted blog, he writes:

You might also have noticed that my own job title contains the words “Head”, “Digital” and “Engagement” in a slightly different order. This is a different job – it’s for our head of department. When the position is filled, it could change the dynamic of the team I work in. And my responsibilities (and job title) might have to change too. A lot will depend on who we recruit.

Fair enough… but I note that the ‘slug’ of the post is ‘time_to_move_on’. Hmm.
Update: Stephen emails to explain – the initial title of the piece was ‘Time to move on?’, with a question mark. (To which the answer was going to be ‘no’.) Except that, of course, the question mark got removed in the translation to a page slug. He assures me, he’s going nowhere.
Having spent the early – and probably the most productive – years of my Civil Service career at the FCO, I can vouch for it as a fine place to work; and with David Miliband as Foreign Secretary, you know there’s support for online work at the very top. If you fancy it, CVs and covering letters are due in by noon on 12 October.

The reality of cheap web hosting

Since I started building sites using WordPress, I’ve tended to use cheap hosting – very cheap hosting. I’ve run high-profile government websites quite comfortably on shared hosting deals costing £50 a year, or less. Some had daily page views running into the thousands; at least one was for 10 Downing Street. It seemed in keeping with the low-cost ethic, and it didn’t let me down.
But over the last few months, I’ve come to understand a bit more about how cheap hosting actually works. The reality, I’ve realised, is that all web hosting is effectively free of charge. When you pay a fee for hosting, you’re really paying for support – or perhaps more accurately, the promise of support when you need it. An insurance policy, in other words.
Looking back, I can recite instances where a cheap hosting company has suspended accounts unilaterally and without warning, because traffic or other activity hit a notional limit. Or where a global setting was changed on a shared webserver, breaking key functionality on one of my sites. For the vast majority of their clients, these wouldn’t have been problematic: most websites won’t trouble their traffic limits, or use difficult functionality. But mine did.
Cheap hosting means zero tolerance. You aren’t paying them enough to employ someone to get in touch proactively before things go wrong; or to respond to your anguish afterwards. They will employ unilateral limits, and make unilateral changes, based solely on a cold analysis of what will suit the majority of clients. Based on automated tests and calculations, not human beings. I’m not blaming them; you can’t really expect them to do anything else.
But that isn’t good enough for serious publishing efforts. They do deserve better – advance warnings, responsive support in a crisis, proactive maintenance to stop bad things ever happening. And that comes at a price.
In the context of my crowdsourced business plan, one emerging idea is long-term site support. In a WordPress context, that means updating the underlying technology; updating WordPress itself; updating themes and plugins; and at each stage, testing to make sure everything still works as intended. So I’m talking to some people about the possibility of providing a WordPress-optimised, centrally managed hosting service, aimed at government and corporate usage. We feel WordPress has reached a certain level of maturity, and it’s probably time the hosting arrangements did so too.
If we do it, it’ll be the best, slickest, smoothest, friendliest, smartest, most tailored solution we can imagine. But it won’t be cheap.

Who says Labour people can't do web?

labourlist2
A couple of (broadly) Labour-related online developments of note late last week.
One was the relaunch of LabourList, just in time for conference. Alex Smith has done great things editorially since taking control of the website in the wake of Drapergate, and entirely deserved the recognition of a high ranking in Iain Dale’s annual poll of the top political blogs. But the website has always been a bit, well, ugly (or indeed, well ugly) – like it was trying too hard.
The new look is a big improvement, primarily because it accepts the reality that it’s really just another multi-author blog. You get a straightforward two-column layout: content plus comments on one side, a site-wide sidebar on the other, with header navigation based (I guess) on tags. It isn’t spectacular in design terms, but it doesn’t need to be. (Mind you, I’m not sure about including everyone’s ‘gravatar’ on every page: that’s going to slow things way down, for everyone.) It’s still powered by the same mysterious Tangent Labs platform as other Labour output; I’m wondering why.
The other was the news that Sarah Brown, the PM’s wife had passed uber-geek Stephen Fry in terms of Twitter followers. As I write this, Mr Fry has 773,000 followers, Mrs Brown has 791,000.
thebrowns
With no great fanfare in the conventional media, Mrs B has built quite a profile around her Million Mums campaign against ‘the needless deaths of women in pregnancy and childbirth around the world’, and other similarly lefty causes. It’s pretty clear she’s writing her own tweets personally, and gets actively involved in terms of replying, re-tweeting and hashtagging. It’s working, and she is often (rightly) used as a best practice example for public figures.
She also did a bit of blogging from last week’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh, again at wordpress.com – although I’m told there has been talk about bringing it properly ‘in house’; and has been contributing to the influential Huffington Post for some time.
Her activity is rarely Labour-branded per se… but of course it’s exactly a year since she sensationally appeared on-stage at the Labour conference to introduce her husband. (It’s quite amusing to look back at the BBC’s live text commentary from the day: ‘It’s almost time for the pre-speech video. Sarah Brown is in the hall. At the lectern. What’s going on? It looks like she is about to address the Labour conference.‘) Now articles are being written, describing her as ‘arguably the most admired and powerful woman in Britain… She might even be the last hope for Labour.’
Don’t underestimate the role her new media activity has played in this.

Presenting the new website for Lynne Featherstone MP

lfhome-1
We’re proud to unveil our latest creation: a new website/blog for Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone (or try this link if the DNS hasn’t rolled over for you yet). It’s taken a good few months, and has thrown up challenges on a scale I haven’t had to tackle before. But equally, it presented several opportunities for cheeky innovation, and as you’ll know by now, I can’t say ‘no’ to those.
A bit of background. Lynne started blogging in October 2003, making her one of the first MPs to do so – although she wasn’t an MP at the time. And in fact, she specifically credits her website as a factor in her winning the Hornsey and Wood Green seat in 2005 (on a 14% swing). She was also the first MP to use Twitter, more or less. And she’s in charge of the LibDems’ online campaigning strategy. No pressure then.
We had five and a half years’ worth of blog posts in Blogger, with over 2,000 user comments, to be migrated to WordPress. Oh, and 2,000 hand-coded press releases from the local party branch, to be integrated too please. Plus accounts on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. And what about her contributions to other websites? Not to mention her activity in Parliament?
LF lifestream
So the grand concept of the site is the use of a tabbed ‘lifestream‘ as the homepage. The initial view lists her last 10 actions, no matter where they happened – including Early Day Motion signatures, which required me to write my own scraper. Then, if you want to see her activity on one of those specific areas, you just click the appropriate tab. It’s all driven by RSS; the tabs are powered by ajax; the lists are generated by a cron for obvious reasons.
We’ve also made some first steps into Facebook integration. If you’re going to comment on the site, you can sign in with your Facebook credentials: this will pull your name and profile photo into the comment, and give you the option of adding an entry to your Facebook news-stream. I’ve used the official WordPress plugin, but it needed more tweaking than I probably expected, and didn’t always work reliably on all browsers. Let’s just say I’ll be keeping a close eye on it.
lf-osI’ve also used Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace API to create a clickable map of the wards which make up Lynne’s constituency, with the precise boundaries marked, and map detail down to individual building outlines. I shouldn’t need to explain why this might prove to have been an – ahem – interesting move. It’s ready, but we won’t be activating it immediately.
The effort that’s gone into the issue and ward pages probably won’t be evident on the front end: you get a short summary, plus the latest posts tagged accordingly, plus any ‘blogroll’ links, plus – where relevant/available – the latest posts from other related sites or blogs, again pulled in via RSS. But crucially, all of this is done using standard WordPress functionality, in such a way that Lynne and her team can create new pages instantly. No (deep) tech knowledge required.
Naturally, it’s got all the sorts of functions you’d expect from a WordPress blog: sidebar widgets, paged comments, RSS feeds, decent SEO, etc etc. We’ve done pretty well in maintaining addresses from the old site: 50 to 60% of the URLs, at a guess, accounting for the vast majority of site traffic. And if you ignore the issues with Facebook’s custom markup language, everything (I think) passes HTML validation. Hooray!
There’s so, so many people to thank on this one. Jonathan Harris, who happens to be a constituent of Lynne’s, for the design work. Matthew Somerville for tweaking something for me within TheyWorkForYou, plus a couple of people within Parliament who tried to help me with EDM RSS through the proper channels, but ultimately couldn’t. Ex-LibDem tech supremo Mark Pack. Lynne’s staff and councillor colleagues for their early feedback. And Lynne herself for trusting me in the early stages, and encouraging me in the later stages when I didn’t necessarily trust myself.
Every site I do, I always try to do something innovative. This time, there are just so many things that I’ve never done before myself, or that I’ve never seen on a website in the same field. It’s been exhausting, occasionally terrifying, but great fun to do. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.

New sites at Defra and BIS

Two major departmental website changes (that I’m aware of?) today – a completely transformed website for Defra, and a new look for BIS’s corporate site.
new-defra
The Defra site feels like an incremental improvement of what went before. Gone is the blocky layout and earthy (and somewhat apt?) colour palette, replaced by the de facto standard tabs and colour gradients, and a slightly esoteric colour scheme. It’s clear a lot of thought has gone into site structure, particularly at the upper levels: a friendly homepage highlighting good feature content, and meaningful tabs.
I like it. But it’s a bit disappointing to learn that ‘[they’ve] had to change the web addresses for most of [their] information’ – and I think they’ve missed a trick by not at least trying to redirect some of the key pages.
defra-google
For example, when you search Google for Defra, you get a list of eight key pages as well as the site homepage – ‘bringing pets to the UK’, ‘animal health & welfare’, ‘your questions answered’ and so on. Only two of these eight links lead anywhere still meaningful. It should only take a minute to add a few ‘301 redirects’ manually. And there’s still no RSS on the site. Grr. These days, I have to say, I think it’s a must-have. Even a reference to the feed generated by COI’s NDS-generated feed would be a help, guys.
new-bis
BIS meanwhile have changed the design of their ‘pulled together in 3 days‘ corporate site: it now looks much more serious, considered, and dare I say it, conventional. I don’t mean that as a criticism; but the previous incarnation felt so much more agile, innovative even, and I’m going to miss having it there as a wonderful case study. Sniff.
The great news is, it’s still running on WordPress. So in fact, it’s probably just as useful a case study: proof that WordPress can do ‘conventional’ too, if that’s what you want. And with the volume of content in the new site structure, it looks like it’s there to stay for a bit longer, too. Steph and Neil have a bit more to say, including details of some interesting things happening behind the scenes: and fair play again to Steph for open-sourcing his coding work.

Crowdsourcing my business plan

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future direction of Puffbox. The company has been in existence for two and a half years, and things have gone pretty well. I’m consistently busy, with regular offers of interesting projects: sometimes too many offers, actually. The mortgage gets paid each month, and there’s no immediate threat to a pretty comfortable status quo. So I’m not worried as such; just keen to stay ahead of the game.
The ‘WordPress (etc) into government’ campaign seems to have been successful; partly through my own efforts, I hope. We’ve got some departments doing some really quite adventurous things, and others dipping toes into the water. There’s now a clutch of us freelancers / consultants selling our expertise into Whitehall, and a few instances of departments doing it for themselves. And with WordPress itself maturing as a product, it feels like we’re entering a new phase.
It’s a shift from ‘look what we can do’ to ‘how can we do it properly?’. A realisation that high-profile sites really can’t rely on individual developers, no matter how multi-talented – for the benefit of the developer as much as the client, possibly moreso even. The accumulation of a year or two of actual real-world experience.
I can see several possible directions Puffbox could take. But I’d like to get some input from those actually inside government: the clients, current and potential. What would be of most interest to you – practically, strategically, financially?

  • More of the same. Keep doing what I’m doing, designing and building modest, innovative sites and apps. But bring in other similarly-skilled people to share the load. We’d continue to use off-the-shelf hosting services, or departments’ own arrangements. Sell the benefit of our longer experience: sure, you could do it yourself, but we’ll do it quicker and better.
  • Move into hosting and support of WordPress sites – not just sites I/we build necessarily, either. ‘Business class’ rather than ‘coach’: expensive, but with a package of WP and plugin upgrading, security, etc etc to merit it. I’d need to form some kind of relationship with a tech guru or two; good news is, I know a few already.
  • Focus on a couple of specific WP-based apps of specific interest to government. Perhaps a ‘press office’ function, skinnable to slot neatly into departmental sites. Or a locally-hosted Basecamp-style project management app. Or a UserVoice-clone. Or an online content aggregator. Or a ‘social intranet’ based on BuddyPress. Or a consultation platform. Hire them out for an ongoing fee, as opposed to selling a one-off deliverable.
  • Develop an expertise in something new – RDFa? Data/API? Geo/mapping? Emailing? Video hosting? Possibly WordPress related, possibly not.
  • Does it weaken the ‘government expertise’ pitch if I start to look at more political or commercial work?

It could be one of the above, or several at once, or something completely different. But I can’t shake the feeling that now is the right time to be doing something. What would you want from me, guys?
If you don’t feel comfortable commenting publicly, drop me an email. And remember, I never refuse the offer of a coffee.

Trying to engage with the Taxpayers' Alliance

I usually let the Taxpayers’ Alliance stuff wash over me. No matter how valid their points often are, it’s getting to the stage where every news story about any government expenditure has to feature an angry quote from them. Maybe journalists really are using that online TPA Quote Generator.
Then today, in the widespread but entirely inaccurate press coverage of a ‘Twittercrat on £118,000pa’, I spot a quote from TPA’s political director Susie Squire: ‘Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0. They want an end to wasteful spending.’ Oh really? OK…
I was interested to find out more about TPA’s view of ‘Web2.0’… so I visited their website. Or specifically, their Typepad-hosted blog. How very ‘Web2.0’ of them. I wonder do they know about the various government websites which have also used Typepad for its cheap hosting, instant availability and high degree of configurability. I haven’t heard them praising it, so maybe not.
Anyway, a ‘Non-job of the week’ post makes a passing reference to the Cabinet Office vacancy, but concentrates on a local council recruiting a new press officer – which, apparently, is a bad thing. Anyway, as the article reaches its conclusion, author Tim Aker writes:

However, another communications officer at the council, taking scarce funds from the frontline, isn’t the answer. The answer is to have councillors do more than canvass at election time. Were we to have a more open political system … then maybe the people would trust politicians more. But as usual, instead of accepting the blindingly obvious solution of cutting back on their profligacy and engaging more with their constituents, the council opts for the norm and throws money at a problem. Sigh.

So the TPA wants more openness in government and politics. More direct engagement between elected representatives and the public. But it doesn’t want ‘Web2.0’ – the use of interactive technology, most of it ‘open source’ (and hence free), to promote direct engagement.
Here’s the thing. Done well, ‘more Web2.0’ has great potential to meet precisely the objective set by the TPA, namely bringing an end to wasteful spending. (And I like to think Puffbox is doing its bit in that regard.) How precisely do you ensure it is ‘done well’? You get someone in who knows what they’re doing. Someone with external experience, and internal seniority. And if you can get them into the one department specifically charged with improving government generally, so much the better.
Do you see where I’m going here, TPA? Sigh indeed.
PS Full marks to the Cabinet Office for their online rebuttal of the pathetic media coverage. It reads like a blog post, but it’s in the press release section of their website. I particularly love the line about @downingstreet being ‘followed by more than 1.2 million people, more than the official White House Twitter and considerably more than the daily circulation on most national newspapers.’

Sky News pressing for TV debate

Sky News letter calling for TV debate
Sky News has launched a high-profile campaign calling on the leaders of the main political parties to commit to a televised debate – or strictly, several – at the next election. They make a compelling case – pointing out that even Afghanistan managed it. Why on earth, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, can’t we?
David Cameron responded almost instantly to Sky’s letter; Nick Clegg has also backed the idea in the past few weeks. Then again, of course they would. So ultimately, it all comes down to the Labour response – although Sky don’t seem to be ruling out the ‘tub of lard’ option.
meerkatI find it quite remarkable that we’ve made it to 2010 without TV debates becoming part of the British electoral process. How dare they refuse the electorate a neatly packaged opportunity to ‘compare the market’? (Sorry.) It shouldn’t be about whether each leader thinks it’s strategically advantageous to him or her. Doesn’t the electorate have an absolute right to expect those who wish to lead it to come before them, and present their case using the electorate’s preferred communication medium? And isn’t it reasonable, in a world where media profile is all, for those leadership candidates to demonstrate their competence in that regard?
For once, I think it’s in everyone’s strategic interests to have the debate this time round. Cameron’s good on camera. Clegg needs the exposure. And Labour can’t do any worse. Actually, if I were Labour, I’d be saying yes, specifically with a view to the long term. If we have a debate this time, it’ll be nigh-on impossible not to have one at every future election. And whilst it mightn’t actually help Labour on this occasion, they may well be grateful of the opportunity to embarrass Cameron (or whoever) in four or eight years’ time.
But you know what? I almost think the most compelling reason for doing it, is simply to do it. Because it’s never been done before, and it might spark a bit of interest among the disinterested. And because it means we’ll never have to have this argument again.
PS: Do I need to note that Sky might not be launching this campaign this solely out of a belief in the democratic benefits? It’s in their interests to ‘own’ the issue… otherwise the event would undoubtedly go to the BBC. (And probably still will.)

COI blogging breaks cover

One of the most gratifying examples of government engagement with the online community was the transformation of COI’s browser guidelines from a self-contradictory, over-long and unworkable draft to a sensible and practical final document, thanks largely to online consultation with the online audience. Yes, I know it sounds obvious, but…
Eight months later, and after further trialling, it’s great to see COI now looking to build on this momentum with the launch of a new Digigov blog, and a promise to ‘share information and get feedback on digital policy across government and to stimulate debate around digital policy with other departments, agencies, web developers, bloggers and academics.’ There’s only an introductory post up there for the moment, so I’ll be watching with interest.
For the record – it’s running on WordPress, the standard version rather than MU as far as I can tell, and uses a custom theme – a one-off rather than a generic COI style – by Harry Metcalfe’s The Dextrous Web. (Note to self: must stop linking to the competition.) It’s another government endorsement of WordPress, and another endorsement of the value of true openness after the disappointment of the internal-only CivilBlogs.
Welcome aboard, guys. Now let’s make some good things happen.